All posts by jake

Security updates for Thursday

Post Syndicated from jake original https://lwn.net/Articles/1026007/

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (gvisor-tap-vsock), Debian (activemq and chromium), Fedora (kea, python-django4.2, python-django5, python-setuptools, and rust-git-interactive-rebase-tool), Oracle (ipa and kernel), Red Hat (buildah, container-tools:rhel8, containernetworking-plugins, git-lfs, go-toolset:rhel8, golang, golang-github-openprinting-ipp-usb, grafana, grafana-pcp, gvisor-tap-vsock, podman, and skopeo), Slackware (libblockdev and xorg), SUSE (gdm, gstreamer-plugins-base, ignition, kernel, pam, redis, s390-tools, screen, systemd, and xorg-x11-server), and Ubuntu (godot, golang-1.22, libblockdev, node-express, pam, samba, and udisks2).

[$] Getting Lustre upstream

Post Syndicated from jake original https://lwn.net/Articles/1025268/

The Lustre filesystem has a long
history, some of which intersects with Linux. It was added to the staging
tree in 2013, but was bounced out of
staging
in 2018, due to a lack of progress and a development model
that was incompatible with the kernel’s. Lustre may be working its way
back into the kernel, though. In a filesystem-track session at
the 2025 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit
(LSFMM+BPF), Timothy Day and James Simmons led a discussion on how to get
Lustre into the mainline.

Security updates for Tuesday

Post Syndicated from jake original https://lwn.net/Articles/1025734/

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (.NET 8.0, .NET 9.0, buildah, containernetworking-plugins, firefox, gstreamer1-plugins-bad-free, libsoup3, podman, skopeo, sqlite, thunderbird, unbound, valkey, varnish, and xz), Debian (webkit2gtk), Fedora (fido-device-onboard, python-django4.2, rust-git-interactive-rebase-tool, and thunderbird), Red Hat (libsoup), Slackware (libxml2), SUSE (java-11-openjdk, kernel, and wireshark), and Ubuntu (c3p0, dojo, python-django, python3.13, python3.12, python3.11, python3.10, python3.9, python3.8, python3.7, python3.6, and requests).

[$] Supporting NFS v4.2 WRITE_SAME

Post Syndicated from jake original https://lwn.net/Articles/1025257/

At the 2025 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit
(LSFMM+BPF), Anna Schumaker led a discussion about implementing the NFS
v4.2 WRITE_SAME
command
in both the NFS client and server. WRITE_SAME is
meant to write large amounts of identical data (e.g. zeroes) to the server
without actually needing to transfer all of it over the wire. In her topic
proposal
, Schumaker wondered whether other filesystems needed the
functionality, so that it should be implemented at the virtual filesystem
(VFS) layer, or whether it should simply be handled as an NFS-specific ioctl().

Security updates for Monday

Post Syndicated from jake original https://lwn.net/Articles/1025618/

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (.NET 8.0 and .NET 9.0), Arch Linux (curl, ghostscript, go, konsole, python-django, roundcubemail, and samba), Fedora (aerc, chromium, golang-x-perf, libkrun, python3.11, python3.12, rust-kbs-types, rust-sev, rust-sevctl, valkey, and wireshark), Gentoo (Konsole and sysstat), Oracle (.NET 9.0), Red Hat (bootc, grub2, keylime-agent-rust, python3.12-cryptography, rpm-ostree, rust-bootupd, xorg-x11-server, and xorg-x11-server-Xwayland), SUSE (apache2-mod_auth_openidc, docker, grub2, java-1_8_0-openj9, kernel, less, python-Django, screen, and sqlite3), and Ubuntu (cifs-utils and modsecurity-apache).

Kernel prepatch 6.16-rc2

Post Syndicated from jake original https://lwn.net/Articles/1025529/

Linus Torvalds has released 6.16-rc2,
which is “admittedly
even smaller than usual
“, though rc2 is not uncommonly one of the smaller
release candidates.

It may be that people are taking a breather after a fairly sizable
merge window, but it might also be seasonal, with Europe starting to
see summer vacations… We’ll see how this goes.

The diffstat looks somewhat unusual, with a lot of one-liners with
both ARC and pincontrol having (presumably independently) ended up
doing some unrelated trivial cleanups.

But even that is probably noticeable only because everything else is
pretty small. That “everything else” is mostly network drivers (and
bluetooth) and bcachefs, with some rust infrastructure and core
networking changes thrown in.

[$] Parallelizing filesystem writeback

Post Syndicated from jake original https://lwn.net/Articles/1024402/

Writeback for filesystems is the process of flushing the “dirty” (written)
data in the page cache to storage. At
the 2025 Linux Storage,
Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit (LSFMM+BPF), Anuj Gupta led a
combined storage and filesystem session on some work that has been done
to parallelize the writeback process. Some of the performance problems
that have been seen with the existing single-threaded writeback came up in
a session at last year’s summit, where the
idea of doing writeback in parallel was discussed.

Security updates for Thursday

Post Syndicated from jake original https://lwn.net/Articles/1025208/

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (kernel), Debian (chromium, gst-plugins-bad1.0, node-tar-fs, and ublock-origin), Gentoo (Emacs, File-Find-Rule, GStreamer, GStreamer Plugins, GTK+ 3, LibreOffice, Node.js, OpenImageIO, Python, PyPy, Qt, X.Org X server, XWayland, and YAML-LibYAML), Mageia (mariadb and roundcubemail), Red Hat (go-toolset:rhel8, golang, grafana, grafana-pcp, gstreamer1-plugins-bad-free, libxml2, libxslt, mod_security, nodejs:20, and perl-FCGI:0.78), Slackware (mozilla), SUSE (docker, docker-compose, iputils, kernel, libsoup, open-vm-tools, rabbitmq-server, rabbitmq-server313, wget, and yelp), and Ubuntu (libsoup2.4 and webkit2gtk).

[$] Improving iov_iter

Post Syndicated from jake original https://lwn.net/Articles/1023891/

The iov_iter interface is used to
describe and iterate through buffers in the kernel. David Howells led a combined storage and
filesystem session at
the 2025 Linux Storage,
Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit (LSFMM+BPF) to discuss ways
to improve iov_iter. His topic
proposal
listed a few different ideas including replacing some
iov_iter types and possibly allowing mixed types in chains of iov_iter
entries; he would like to make the interface itself and the uses of iov_iter in
the kernel better.

Security updates for Monday

Post Syndicated from jake original https://lwn.net/Articles/1024625/

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (golang, nodejs22, thunderbird, and varnish), Debian (gimp, modsecurity-apache, python-tornado, and roundcube), Fedora (chromium, coreutils, fcgi, ghostscript, krb5, libvpx, mingw-gstreamer1-plugins-bad-free, mingw-libsoup, mod_security, and samba), Mageia (php-adodb, systemd, and tomcat), Red Hat (buildah, firefox, glibc, grafana, kernel, libsoup, libxslt, mod_security, perl-FCGI, podman, python-tornado, and skopeo), Slackware (libvpx), and SUSE (helm-mirror, iputils, and libraw).

[$] Zero-copy for FUSE

Post Syndicated from jake original https://lwn.net/Articles/1023689/

In a combined storage and filesystem session at the 2025 Linux Storage,
Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit (LSFMM+BPF), Keith Busch led
a discussion about zero-copy operations for the Filesystem
in Userspace
(FUSE) subsystem. The session was proposed
by his colleague, David Wei, who could not make it to the summit, so Busch
filled in, though he noted that “I do not really know FUSE so
well
“. The idea is to eliminate data copies in the data path to and
from the FUSE server in user space.

Security updates for Thursday

Post Syndicated from jake original https://lwn.net/Articles/1024158/

Security updates have been issued by Debian (chromium and mariadb-10.5), Oracle (firefox, ghostscript, git, go-toolset:ol8, golang, kernel, krb5, mingw-freetype and spice-client-win, nodejs:20, nodejs:22, perl-CPAN, python36:3.6, rsync, varnish, and varnish:6), Red Hat (firefox, thunderbird, and webkit2gtk3), Slackware (curl and python3), SUSE (apache-commons-beanutils, apache2-mod_security2, avahi, buildkit, ca-certificates-mozilla, cloud-regionsrv-client, cloud-regionsrv-client, python-toml, containerd, containerized-data-importer, cups, curl, dnsmasq, docker, elemental-operator, elemental-toolkit, expat, firefox, freetype2, gdk-pixbuf, git, glib2, glibc, gnuplot, gnutls, gpg2, gstreamer, gstreamer-plugins-base, gtk3, haproxy, helm, java-17-openjdk, java-1_8_0-openjdk, keepalived, kernel, kernel-firmware, krb5, kubevirt, less, libarchive, libcryptopp, libdb-4_8, libndp, libpcap, libsoup, libtasn1, libvirt, libX11, libxml2, libxslt, Mesa, mozilla-nss, nghttp2, nvidia-open-driver-G06-signed, opensc, openssh, openssl-3, openssl-3, libpulp, ulp-macros, orc, pam, pam_pkcs11, pam_u2f, patch, pcp, pcr-oracle, shim, perl-Crypt-OpenSSL-RSA, podman, postgresql16, procps, protobuf, python-dnspython, python-Jinja2, python-requests, python-setuptools, python-tornado6, python-urllib3, python311, python311, python-rpm-macros, qemu, rsync, runc, rust-keylime, selinux-policy, sevctl, skopeo, sssd, SUSE Manager Client Tools, systemd, thunderbird, tiff, tpm2.0-tools, tpm2-0-tss, u-boot, ucode-intel, unbound, util-linux, vim, wget, and wpa_supplicant), and Ubuntu (linux-nvidia, python-django, twitter-bootstrap3, twitter-bootstrap4, and wireshark).

[$] Device-initiated I/O

Post Syndicated from jake original https://lwn.net/Articles/1022718/

Peer-to-peer DMA (P2PDMA) has been part of
the kernel since the 4.20 release in 2018;
it provides a framework that allows devices to transfer data between themselves
directly, without using system RAM for the transfer. At the 2025 Linux
Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit (LSFMM+BPF), Stephen
Bates led a combined storage, filesystems, and memory-management session on
device-initiated I/O, which is perhaps what P2PDMA is evolving toward. Two
years ago, he led a session on P2PDMA at the
summit; this year’s session was a brief update on P2PDMA with a look
at where it may be heading.

[$] The importance of free software to science

Post Syndicated from jake original https://lwn.net/Articles/1023299/

Free software plays a critical role in science, both in research and in
disseminating it. Aspects of software freedom are directly relevant to
simulation, analysis, document preparation and preservation, security,
reproducibility, and usability. Free software brings practical and specific
advantages, beyond just its ideological roots, to science, while
proprietary software comes with equally specific risks. As a practicing
scientist, I would like to help others—scientists or not—see the benefits
from free software in science.

Security updates for Monday

Post Syndicated from jake original https://lwn.net/Articles/1023501/

Security updates have been issued by Debian (espeak-ng, kitty, kmail-account-wizard, krb5, libreoffice, libvpx, net-tools, python-flask-cors, symfony, tcpdf, thunderbird, and twitter-bootstrap3), Fedora (chromium, dropbear, firefox, gstreamer1-plugins-bad-free, python-tornado, systemd, and thunderbird), Mageia (coreutils, deluge, glib2.0, and redis), Oracle (firefox, kernel, and systemd), Red Hat (firefox, kernel, kernel-rt, varnish, varnish:6, and zlib), SUSE (bind, curl, dnsdist, docker, ffmpeg-7, firefox, glibc, golang-github-prometheus-alertmanager, govulncheck-vulndb, icinga2, iputils, java-11-openjdk, java-1_8_0-ibm, kea, kernel, libopenssl-3-devel, libsoup, libxml2, nodejs-electron, open-vm-tools, openbao, perl-Net-Dropbox-API, pluto, poppler, postgresql14, postgresql15, postgresql16, postgresql17, python312-setuptools, runc, s390-tools, skopeo, sqlite3, thunderbird, and unbound), and Ubuntu (apport and libphp-adodb).

Security updates for Thursday

Post Syndicated from jake original https://lwn.net/Articles/1023072/

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (kernel and kernel-rt), Debian (firefox-esr, libvpx, net-tools, php-twig, python-tornado, setuptools, varnish, webpy, yelp, and yelp-xsl), Fedora (xen), Mageia (cimg and ghostscript), Oracle (gstreamer1-plugins-bad-free, kernel, libsoup, thunderbird, and unbound), Red Hat (firefox, mingw-freetype and spice-client-win, pcs, and varnish:6), Slackware (curl and mozilla), SUSE (apparmor, containerd, dnsdist, go1.23-openssl, go1.24, gstreamer-plugins-bad, ImageMagick, jetty-minimal, python-tornado, python313-setuptools, s390-tools, thunderbird, tomcat10, ucode-intel, and wxWidgets-3_2), and Ubuntu (ffmpeg, krb5, libsoup3, libsoup2.4, linux-aws-5.4, linux-aws-fips, linux-fips, linux-oracle-6.8, net-tools, and python-setuptools, setuptools).

[$] Cory Doctorow on how we lost the internet

Post Syndicated from jake original https://lwn.net/Articles/1021871/

Cory Doctorow wears many hats:
digital activist, science-fiction author, journalist, and more. He has
also written many books, both fiction and non-fiction, runs the Pluralistic blog, is a visiting
professor, and is an advisor to the Electronic
Frontier Foundation
(EFF); his Chokepoint Capitalism
co-author, Rebecca Giblin, gave a 2023 keynote
in Australia
that we covered. Doctorow gave a rousing keynote on
the state of the “enshitternet”—today’s internet—to kick
off the recently held PyCon US
2025
in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Security updates for Monday

Post Syndicated from jake original https://lwn.net/Articles/1022639/

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (389-ds-base, ghostscript, grafana, kernel, and osbuild-composer), Debian (intel-microcode, kernel, libphp-adodb, and openssl), Fedora (dotnet8.0, ghostscript, iputils, nbdkit, open-vm-tools, thunderbird, and vyper), Mageia (chromium-browser-stable, glibc, iputils, microcode, nodejs, and zsync), Oracle (.NET 8.0, .NET 9.0, 389-ds-base, avahi, buildah, compat-openssl11, expat, firefox, ghostscript, gimp, git, grafana, gvisor-tap-vsock, libsoup, libxslt, mod_auth_openidc, nginx, nodejs:20, osbuild-composer, podman, skopeo, thunderbird, vim, webkit2gtk3, xdg-utils, xterm, and yelp), Red Hat (kernel, kernel-rt, libsoup, libsoup3, python-tornado, and ruby), Slackware (ffmpeg), SUSE (audiofile, firefox, glibc, govulncheck-vulndb, grafana, kernel, kind, kubo, libecpg6, postgresql13, postgresql14, python-Django, python-setuptools, python-tornado6, python311-Flask, python311-tornado6, python313, python36-setuptools, thunderbird, transfig, and xen), and Ubuntu (glib2.0, linux-bluefield, linux-ibm, linux-raspi, and openjdk-21-crac).

[$] Long-duration stress-testing for filesystems

Post Syndicated from jake original https://lwn.net/Articles/1020966/

Testing filesystems is a frequent topic at
the Linux Storage, Filesystem,
Memory Management, and BPF Summit (LSFMM+BPF); the 2025 edition was no
exception. Boris Burkov led a filesystem-track session to discuss
stress-testing filesystems—and running those tests for lengthy periods. He
reviewed what he has been doing when testing filesystems and wanted to
gather ideas for what could be done to catch more bugs before the
filesystems hit production.